Dream Calling
by Stalking Severus Snape
Summary: Change is. It is not good nor bad. It simply is. How one elf woman deals with the passage of anceint times into modern. Loosely based on Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest, but all my own characters and story.


"Dream Calling"   
By Ami E. Bowen aka Skayda  
  
Summery: "Change is. It is not good nor bad. It simply is."   
How one elf woman deals with the passage of ancient times into modern ones.   
***  
The stars had seemed uncommonly bright that night. As she lay on her back, the cool grass tickling her ankles and the delicate skin behind her neck, staring up...up past the treetops and smoke curling from the cement and brick built dwellings down below the mountain...up at the bright pin-pricks of light twinkling like a million eyes from the darkness above and all around her, she wove pictures and stories with those stars. She told them to herself and never, ever spoke of them to others.   
  
She was afraid. She was afraid of being laughed at and called a fool. She was not a fool. She had told herself that every night she woke up after sleeping, curled deep in her cave, buried in thick animal furs, all day. In the evening, when she awoke, she either ate something one of the hunters had brought back, hunted for herself when no one brought her anything, (which had, over the past hundred years or so, became more the norm as the forest's game was slowly depleted), she fixed bowstrings, sharpened her knife, or stared at the stars.   
  
At times, one of her lovers came to her and she spent a few hours frolicking in the bedfurs or grasses with him or her. She never, ever spoke even a whisper about the dreams that haunted her sleep and seeped into her veins while she was awake, filling her heart with a trepidation she could not place, even if she could taste it in the air like some could taste the sickness in rotten meat.   
  
Sighing, she lifted her head, shoved a length of her pitch black hair behind one slightly pointed ear and sat up. Sniffing the air, she could smell the electric charge of an on-coming storm. Unlike most of her people, she enjoyed the storms...the bold display of fire and sound...the faint scent of something burning, charged, like passion, like excitement....almost like the joining of two bodies....  
  
She sat up on her hill...the hill that no one but she ever came to and so it had been given to her by their leader one night during a particularly lengthily gathering. The good leader had been drunk on berry wine when she'd claimed the hill in StarWatcher's name. No one had really anything to do with the hill and so the leader's word had become fact; the hill did indeed belong to StarWatcher. (or did she belong to it?) She sat up on her hill and watched and listened as the storm rage on, stripping to dance, naked on her hill. Her lithe body colored white by flashes of light. The booming thunder became her music.   
  
Sometimes Gerrid showed up on her hill, panting after the long hike, leaning on his wooden carved rat's-head walking stick, smiling at her with his midnight blue eyes. His light hair falling across his features like a rebellious puff of cloud, forever disregarding the fingers which tried to tame it back behind his long, tapering ears.  
  
She was always happy to see Gerrid. Gerrid would hold her in his arms and listen to her heart beat against his in time to the rhythm of their lovemaking. She liked him because he never held her too tight. She valued her freedom and he seemed to respect that. Content to take what she would and leave her the rest. She seemed to be the only one to ever keep her sanity after being imtroduced to Jade's touch. She wondered if that were the only reason the impenetrable gem kept coming back to her.   
  
***  
"Tell me a secret, StarWatcher." Jade blinked, her huge eyes caught the light of the moon, which was halfway across the sky, and glowed like cat's for a moment, "Tell me a good secret."  
  
StarWatcher stared past the opening in the cave, towards the gray skies and the falling rain and wished she were on her hill right now. Last night it had stormed hard. She wished she were with Gerrid. Dancing. Naked. On her hill. She sighed and turned back to Jade, reached up and gently took a strand of her red-gold hair into her hand and let the lengths slide through her fingers.   
  
"I don't know any secrets." She said at last, rolling over, her back to her lover and closed her eyes. She knew she wouldn't sleep. She knew Jade knew it too. She could never sleep during a storm, night or no.   
  
"Yes, you do." Jade whispered, her mouth over StarWatcher's ear, tickling with her breath, "You know all sorts of secrets, StarWatcher."   
  
"You really want to hear a secret, Jade?" StarWatcher rolled back over, facing Jade, feeling a plump breast rubbing against her own, "I'll tell you one, then..."  
  
"Good..." Jade sighed, entwining her long legs around and in-between StarWatcher's, her fingertips like fire as they dipped lower, touching, exploring... "Tell me...now..."  
  
"I...dream..." StarWatcher gasped, shocked as she always was by Jade's magical caresses, being pulled down into an abyss of pleasure so deep she didn't know if she would ever emerge, "I dream and sometimes the things I dream come true."  
  
"Oh?" Jade leaned over her, her long hair falling like a curtain to hide her face, only her eyes peeked though, as she leaned forward and touched StarWatcher's already erect nipple lightly with the tip of her tongue. She sat up again, straddling StarWatcher's waist, "How so?"  
  
Shuddering past the lightning coursing though her bones, StarWatcher's eyes closed, she wondered how the storm could have gotten inside her snug cave. She trembled as Jade caressed her, murmuring nonsensical words all over her body, and gave herself up to the violent shaking and sudden, brief dreamless blackness that always came to her like the tingling of the stars in her belly afterwards.   
  
"How so?" Jade asked again.   
  
StarWatcher grew silent, pulling the blankets up around her shoulders and drawing her knees to her chin. She shook her head, laying her forehead against her knees, ashamed. She had never told anyone about her dreams before. She had wanted to tell Gerrid, more than once, but she had been afraid. Now she had gone and told Jade. She didn't know who to despise more, herself for her weakness or Jade for exposing that weakness.   
  
Yet, as Jade gazed at her and the storm died down to a faint drizzle, she realized that she had seen all of this once before, in a dream. She realized that she had been meant to tell Jade about her dreams after all. It had been already foretold.   
  
"Sometimes...they come true." She repeated, not saying more. She remember now that the dream did not have her say more. Jade nodded, clearly confused and left. StarWatcher did not watch her walk across the camp to her own cave, naked and uncaring who might see.   
  
StarWatcher lay awake all day and finally fell asleep sometime near twilight, thinking of her mother.   
  
"Change is." MoonDancer had once told her only child, "It is not good nor bad...it simply is. Remember that, Star."   
  
Then, before the watching, before the dreams, she had been called Star.   
  
StarWatcher's mother had been radiant, laughing all the time, and forever playful...right up til the day she left the clan with an elf from another land, claiming to have been in deep love. At the time, StarWatcher didn't understand. How could she love another after her father? That was before Jade and Gerrid.   
  
She watched her mother climb into the front seat of the huge metal monster most of the other elves from other clans had taken to carrying themselves around in, slam the door closed and take off down the dangerous mountain roads towards the town below.   
***  
  
Wild Hunters was the name of her clan, or it had been at one time, a long time before she was ever conceived. She thought of her people as the Wild Hunters. She thought the name fit perfectly. Where other elf clans had split up, gone their separate ways and worked side by side with the humans who had always sought to destroy them in cities and towns. They lived in huge houses with glass window and watered horribly stunted lawns of green grass, played at tennis and golf with neighbors and kept dogs as pets chained to miniature houses in the back of their own huts. Their children boarded a large yellow monster and were herded off each morning to a building to be taught more of the human ways...all the while forgetting their true elfin heritage. Her clan, her small network of people...her elves...were still the Wild Hunters of the past.   
  
StarWatcher wondered many times if her clan was the only one to have stayed so long with the old ways. She knew the time was coming when she would be forced away from her beloved forest, her hill, her people would be forced to convert to modern times or die out completely. She wondered how they would survive the passage.   
She wondered how she would survive. She was even afraid to dream about it.   
  
It wasn't as if they never saw their modern kindred. StarWatcher danced at the yearly gatherings, listened intently to the stories told around the fire pit which filled her belly like nothing else could.   
She meet her kin and kith on those nights, shook hands, kissed cheeks and caressed flesh. But when they would ask her to leave and join them in the world outside the forest, she would always shake her head no.   
  
She felt the old ones' tears like knives in her heart, ripping her apart, every time they gazed at an elven child and heard him or her speaking in the human tongue, singing human songs...all but forgetting anything elfin. She knew the old ones weeped because they knew the truth. The sad, sad truth...elfkind was doomed....the lifeless eyes of modern elf children said as much.   
  
***  
  
She sat up on her hill and weeped into the night, her face high, tears like rivlets falling down her cheeks, dripping from her chin. Last week an elf in a shiny black suit and tie knotted tightly at his thin throat had come to the camp, spoke to them and shook his head sadly, his brown eyes all but mute of emotion. StarWatcher could not even reach him with her mind. All she felt was a muddy pond, his thoughts buried in layers of muck and grim.   
  
Impossible to get through.   
  
He had told them they had to leave. The forest had to be cut down to make room for something called a 'parking lot'.   
He offered her a place with him...he offered to help them all, somehow, to find new homes and to adjust to the changes. She wondered if he knew how to help them mend their hearts and peice back together thier souls.   
  
***  
  
She had spat at him and ran. She ran to her hill and pulled weeds from the ground as savagely as she could until her fingers were raw and her knuckles bled from all the sharp thorns in her way.   
  
She had heard Gerrid's spirit howl as it broke free of it shell. She had held him as he gasped his last...his chest a bloody mess from where he had plunged his dagger in hilt-deep. She had come running when his pain had struck her across the face like a stinging slap, but she realized that he had always been in pain...only she had been too overcome with her own worries to feel it.   
  
She ran. When she got to him, it was nearly too late, Gerrid breathed her name and sighed. She watched his lips breath in once and never out again.   
  
She wanted to take his dagger and end her own existence. She wanted to be like Gerrid and not face tomorrow...not face the descent into modern times....she wanted to cling to the old ways for as long as she could....  
  
***  
She danced up on her hill...a pitiful lump of grass in her benefactor's 'back yard'...danced naked in the moonlight and tried never to forget her dreams....She felt the lightning sing through her blood and the thunder crack and fondle her essence as Jade might have done once upon a time.   
  
The years passed into centuries...StarWatcher mothered many children, both elf and human, though none had ever emerged from between her thighs, nor claimed her as 'Mother'. In time, she was advised to take on a more normal sounding name and her Wild Hunters' name became her second name.  
  
In time, she became known as Susan StarWatcher and made money selling her dreams as prophecies to the people who came to visit her in the house left by her elfin protector and lover...the bringer of bad news once upon a time...once the object of her hate, spat at and raged against....   
  
She wasn't really surprise that most of her customers were elves. Humans, most anyway, scoffed at her tales or dismissed her as insane...but she could see the fear in their hearts whenever they would come 'round....too curious for their own good. The elves came to her more to be near someone who still seemed to hold a connection to their past, their heritage, no matter how thin and fragile that connection may be. They came to her to hear her dreams and nodded to themselves, remembering gatherings in the forest, tales around fires, and dances in starlight.   
  
Susan StarWatcher began to forget there was ever a time when she'd kept her dreams to herself. She still cried herself to sleep. She still longed for her hill...for her people...for Gerrid...even for Jade...Who she had not seen since she'd opened up her business....She wanted the storm to come again and sweep it all away....far, far away...and let her people, her elven people, start whole...new....She closed her eyes and dreamed of the storm...again....  
  
~End~ 


End file.
